Happy new year! With the holidays not long ended there’s not much news to speak of so it’s a bumper episode of (almost) nothing but game talk.

Community Manager Andrew Crews joins the regular crew of myself, Perry and Todd to talk about all the games we’ve been playing over the break. It’s a long list which includes everything from Renegade Ops, Sonic The Hedgehog 4, Battlefield 1943 to Meteos Wars, All Zombies Must Die!, Doritos Crash Course and many more. It’s packed show, so stop reading this and get listening!

Apologies if the audio is a bit off this week, we had to resort to a backup because of some technical issues.

Please subscribe, comment, review the podcast on iTunes and tell your friends! We appreciate it! Check us out on twitter (@XBLAFans) where you can win codes for games, give us feedback or just ask a question.

Big thanks again to Chris Green for the awesome theme music, be sure to check out his site BlurredEdge and why not follow him on twitter too@BlurredEdge.

The 12 Days of XBLA was an amazing success and we hope to bring you all more contests like this in the years to come. Thanks to all of our awesome community members for participating with over 1700 entries in a twelve day span, that’s quite an impressive turnout. And a huge thanks to the fine people at Microsoft and all the developers/publishers that donated all the prizes. Without them, none of this would be possible.

With that said, let’s get to the moment we have all been waiting for. After all the dust settled and we ran our random number generator for one last time in 2011, we are now proud to announce @OnyxPrimal as the winner of the Grand Prize worth over $150! Congratulations, you have won a copy of the following XBLA games:Read More

It’s the Wednesday before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring except…this week’s Xbox Live Arcade release, Trine 2! This beautiful platformer from Frozenbyte and … Read More

We’re over the half way mark now on our 12 Days of XBLA promotion, but don’t worry there’s still plenty of chances for you to win. Today’s prize will be the awesome action-RPG-tower defense hybrid, Dungeon Defenders. For a chance to get your mitts on Trendy Entertainment’s epic hit, put your creativity hat on and come up with your best caption for the above image featuring the game’s Squire hero. You might want to check out the official Dungeon Defenders webpage for some inspiration. And remember to follow us on twitter for more chances to win great games.

The winner of yesterday’s contest is: Josh Hobbs (@JoshieSquashie) – You have won a copy of Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. We will be in touch with you today on Twitter!

Major Nelson released the Top 20 XBLA sales for the week of December 15. 2011; these stats are based on individual full game purchases. Halfbrick is still proving that ninjas and fruit are an unbeatable combo, coming in first with Fruit Ninja Kinect. The next three on the list should be of no surprise to anyone: Pinball FX2, From Dust, and Dungeon Defenders. What is surprising this week is that Lara Croft and the Gurdian of Light sneaks in at a cozy number five, proving that a good sale can do wonders for a great game. Check out the full list of 20 for the week after the break.Read More

Hey guys, we’re bringing you a new feature that’s simple and helpful in nature, the XBLAFans Monthly Roundup! This as well as other features will be seen a lot more should all things go accordingly, and we’ll even have some new ones on the way, so stay tuned because there’s a lot of awesome in the works here at XBLAFans.

If it wasn’t obvious by the title, this post will be your one-stop-shop to anything that happened this month with links to all our posts and excerpts where applicable. That means news, reviews, guides, features, interviews, podcasts, and even a recount of releases and sales data. Hit the jump for so many links you’ll never not know something about XBLA current events again!Read More